One hell of a nice old age

They got their first record deal in 1968, then came drugs, dissolution ... and now the Stooges are back. But why would infamous frontman Iggy Pop want to rejoin a band he associates with 'disaster, flames, failure'? Laura Barton asks him

Late afternoon in Miami; a buff-coloured lizard sits on the table and blinks. From across the river waft the strains of Nat King Cole singing Unforgettable, and Iggy Pop strides across the lawn, bare-chested, in a pair of cerise trousers. At almost 60, Pop is lithe and taut and still instantly recognisable as the sinewy frontman of the Stooges, the great innovator of punk rock who became famous not only for the music but for the live shows, the bodily juices, the hard drugs, the sex and the see-through trousers. Yet there is a mellowness to his demeanour today, as if he has been basking in the late sun, and his voice has grown warm and lazy, like melting tarmac. He seems thoroughly contented with a life that has stretched from Michigan to Miami, to this small wooden house, with a 72 Oldsmobile in the driveway, Head & Shoulders shampoo in the bathroom, Haitian art in the bedroom. "I have a life elsewhere," he insists. "I have a girlfriend and we've a nice big pile 45 minutes from here. We've got dogs, birds, fish. But this is where I live in the old way."

Pop moved down here following his divorce and fuelled by an increasing disenchantment with New York. "I was looking for a new place round Gramercy Park one day," he recalls, "and a guy passed me on the street - I still remember the moment - it was brisk weather and he looked smug. Thick fur-lined collar on his overcoat which was cut a certain way to flatter his paunch and he had three layers of straight-out-of-the-dry-cleaner crap on under that and I felt eeurgh," he says with disgust. A friend who was a "borderline disreputable type" sold him a cheap condo down here on the beachfront. "I was scared at first because this place had a bad rep," he says, "but all of a sudden I had this little dump, this single room occupancy flat with a hotplate, with a whole wall that was just glass and the ocean. And everything stopped." He smiles in a leisurely way. "I'd been 20 years in New York, I'd been almost all my life in big cities proving shit."

There is a restlessness that has long permeated his work, a clawing need to escape, to outrun boredom, that has characterised both his music and his lyrics, from the thrust of the Stooges to his solo work, in songs such as Lust For Life, 1969, The Passenger, and in his various collaborations with David Bowie. It is still there today, on the re-formed Stooges' new album, The Weirdness. "There's still the same desire to escape," Pop agrees, "from things that ultimately would require me to act in a manner that to me is kind of a life that's dead." He wanders off to pose for photographs. He returns wearing a silk kimono and props his legs on the table. He has very pretty feet.

He is reminiscing about his autobiography, I Need More, written several years ago. "I basically used an audience, liquor and drugs to get that out," he says. "I had a burning desire to do it, because I knew I was going to become reasonable." He smirks, tugs at his kimono. "I realised that to live on I was going to have to change and I knew that once I changed I was going to become more like Them. And hence less extreme, more boring. I'm OK with that now." Does the old Iggy ever rear up? He leans back and smiles, the kimono drifting open again. "I get days and nights when that person within me is in full effect, but I deal with it. I have tricks. I use various forms of detachment. And then I'm having one hell of a nice old age. I have more of the things I wanted at 18 to 25 than I did then." He calls up an inventory: "Sex, hot songs, band gigs, and I wanted to be happy when I looked in the mirror. Strength," he adds softly. "Those would be your basic five male adolescent urges as I experienced them. Oh ... and then, of course, there was success."

Success eluded Pop for years. When the Stooges were signed to Elektra in 1968, on the strength of their live shows, they were expected to be huge. Yet their first two albums, The Stooges and Fun House, failed to sell and the band gradually dissolved as Pop's heroin addiction grew. Thereafter he enjoyed mild ripples of accomplishment with solo recordings but few commercial successes. At one point, broke and addicted to various substances, he found himself homeless on the streets of LA.

Throughout it all, however, the name Iggy Pop has remained a touchstone of cool. He is imitated, idolised, namechecked in song. He laughs, a deep, sticky laugh. "There's one I heard called Iggy Pop's Ocelot Shop. He's on guitar and there's a cardboard cutout of me with a moving mouth on it. He sings, 'Have you got an ocelot?' And I sing, 'I've got lots of ocelots!' "

There was perhaps a certain inevitability about the re-formation of the Stooges, though it was something Pop resisted for a long while. Around five years ago he began to reconsider. "I was just at a dead end. I'd hit a wall," he says. "I didn't feel there was anything else that I needed to do, that I should be doing, that I could do." He was out on tour at the time, with a band of younger musicians. "They were basically delinquent thugs, troubled people - which is great, I work with troubled people, that's what I do," he laughs. "But they weren't as creative as the original and it started occurring to me, my God, this hasn't got the touch it did. But it terrified me to think about getting in the group again. For one thing I'd gained a great measure of control of things. For another I associated the band with disaster, flames, failure."

The three band members were still on amicable terms, however. The drummer, Scott Asheton, had raised the subject of a reunion every couple of years. "And Ron [guitarist and Scott's brother] I think was interested but suspicious about the terms," Pop says. "So I made it clear really quick. I said, 'The same even split, the same deal, is that cool with you?' You start with the dirty stuff, with the money." Initially the Stooges were only supposed to play on one track on Iggy's 2003 album Skull Ring. Then the record label asked if they'd record an entire album together, "because they sensed celebrity moment, mmh-hmmm," he purrs, "and they suggested a very successful producer from LA who called me up and when I said the group wasn't ready, he said, 'This is your shot, right now.' Yunno, typical Hollywood. The horror, the horror of these people!"

Around the same time, Jack White also offered to produce a new Stooges record. White, a fellow Michigan native who had long feted the Stooges, had recently revived the career of Loretta Lynn, producing her album Van Lear Rose. "I had two minds about it," Pop admits, "because I'd been in a hard-knock world long enough to know if he had done it, we'd have a hit. And not just cos of who he is. He's skilled, a good boy." Yet Pop turned him down: it had been a long while since the three had played together and the Stooges, he says, weren't yet ripe for the comeback. He laughs. "Jack wrote me an email the other day and he asked, 'So I hear you wrote your record - did you get around to recording 1971 yet?' " [Two Stooges tracks are called 1969 and 1970.]

While Pop's solo albums had involved many other musicians, from Bowie to Peaches to Green Day, the other Stooges were reluctant to have guest stars on The Weirdness. "I tried to get them to do a song with Peaches on Skull Ring and they refused," Pop recalls. "It was Ron actually. He's gonna kill me for saying this. I said, 'Go on the internet, check her out, you'll love her!' He left me a message: 'Jim, I looked at that Peaches. Bitch needs a shave.' " The one non-Stooge to appear on The Weirdness is another Michiganer, Brendan Benson. "I wanted a sweet, clean, effortless, American voice on the particular chorus he sang with me," Pop explains. "It was a commentary on the US and it was from a certain point of view. And Brendan not only had the voice but he has a real similar background to the three of us."

Pop's background was not especially illustrious. Born James Newell Osterberg Jr, he grew up the son of a teacher among the Ford motor plants in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "The Michigan stuff stays. Yeah. It's way down in there," he says, nodding toward his gut. "The auto industry was at its most optimistic when I was a kid there, and the cars were beautiful, all aggressively optimistic, wildly voluptuous Corvettes. There was this whole culture then into which you were immediately inculcated as a school child; when I was eight we were taken through the plants where they would press the body parts. There was just a whole vibe there, an atmosphere where mechanised things were good. Henry Ford had a dream, he wanted to create his own world. Somehow something rubbed off, and the people in the 60s who were trying to make music and culture in Michigan, we just didn't give a flying fuck what you thought in London, Paris, New York, LA. I could get rewarded right there. I could get a good gig, a chick, dope, beer. It was desirable to know about the outside world, but our tastes were direct and honest. Something came up in the air there."

In the mid-60s, Pop dropped out of university to pursue a music career. He'd begun playing drums in high school (one band was the Iguanas, which was when people started calling him Iggy) and he had a hankering for the blues. He decided to head to Chicago. "I thought maybe I can play with all those great black guys whose records I like," he says. "And I wasn't good enough to play with those guys but I was weird enough to just sit in, which was unusual, and I picked up gigs once in a while if they were playing for a white audience. I did that for a couple of months and copped a 'tude from it, cos I saw how those guys acted, which was a lot how I later started acting." One night he was standing by the Chicago river, smoking a joint, when he realised he was never going to be a blues drummer. He had, however, always believed he could write - several years earlier he had won $25 in a poetry contest and that seemed affirmation enough. He returned to Michigan determined to be a singer and in search of a band.

To many, Pop remains the definitive stage performer: strutting, gurning, baiting the crowd. Indeed he is credited with inventing the stage dive. Yet he claims the transition from drummer to frontman was "excruciating! Uhhh, it took years! And people who knew me felt bad for me, they thought I'd lost my mind. Because I'm told I was a pretty shit-hot drummer. They were going 'apparently' he's a 'singer' now, 'apparently' he's got a 'band' now, 'apparently' they haven't 'figured out' their 'sound' now ..." It took the Stooges two years to "figure out" their sound. "The first year I actually went to a couple of bars in the area and tried to sing blues, and that was a disaster," he laughs. "I was really bad. I sang a Bobby 'Blue' Bland song, Turn on Your Love Light. 'You left me sitting in the dark crying ...' " he sings gently. "I have the croon now," he says. "I didn't have it then. No, it took a few more cigarettes, the metabolism slows down. About 25 I started hitting it, there's a chorus on Raw Power, you can hear it."

Pop's parents were also worried their son had lost his mind, abandoning his studies. "Mmh-hmm." He smiles. "But once I'd gone ahead and lost it, my mother just continued to encourage me and my father kept his mouth shut. He felt he owed me one dramatic moment, so at one point when I was going to leave home and start the band, he said, 'You wanna get out this door, you're gonna have to go through me!' He's a lot bigger than me, a real American macho military-style dude. And I thought, oh fuck, this is gonna hurt, I'm gonna get the shit kicked out of me. But when he saw my resolve, he was graceful."

Pop's parents even came to see him play live on a few occasions. "They found it exhilarating," he says mildly, as if describing a cliff-top walk. Was this, one wonders, at the giddy heights of his live shows, when he was in the habit of smearing raw meat and peanut butter across his chest? "More or less," he admits. "Though peanut butter happened once in my life. As did most things that people say I did. But the atmosphere was there. Things could happen. They saw me once at a gig at an outdoor race track where I was giving as good as I got, and my dad told me later, 'Weeell, you remind me of a lot of pitchers that I used to go to see - a lot of speed, a lot of flash, no control.'" Despite his rebellious posturing, his parents' approval has been curiously important to Pop throughout his career. "My mother's passed away now, and my father's not in a state to give or withhold approval at this point, he's very, very weak now, but he said to me at one point: 'You made your dream stick, Jim.' And I thought that was big of him."

To the world at large, the renaissance of Iggy Pop came in 1996 with the film Trainspotting. An adaptation of Irvine Welsh's story of heroin addicts in Edinburgh, it featured Pop's song Lust For Life, played loud and bombastic, as a musical two-fingered salute. Pop recalls a screening of the film in London. "I had a whole room to myself and I said, my God, when are they gonna stop playing it? And it kept going! God! And it was so loud!" Pop puts it down to his playing "over and over" in Barrowland in Glasgow: "And one of those times they really did live out the scene where he spends his girlfriend's birthday going to see me. And that gig was crackin'. I sang a line in that gig: 'Scotland takes drugs in psychic defence'."

Trainspotting became a cult hit and suddenly, after years out in the cold, it felt as if everyone wanted to know Iggy Pop. "Yeah," he growls, "to the world of yada de yadies, Christ, as soon as I had that..." The offers rolled in - film soundtracks, TV shows, ads. Lust For Life was recently used to advertise a cruise line and a dog show requested I Wanna Be Your Dog. Pop is delighted he no longer has to grovel to the "media wankers who look like someone inserted a distress signal in their soul".

This spring will see the Stooges on tour to promote The Weirdness. Their shows are a little different now, of course. There is less madness, less peanut butter, fewer groupies. Pop smiles. "For one thing I'm older, so that's different, that cuts out a lot of them. And I have a lot of organisation in all aspects of my life, I use that to protect myself. Tons of it, up the fucken bazumba, a manager for every damned thing I do. They [groupies] usually want something else anyway, yunno? They don't generally just want to jump you, they want a prince or a promoter or a contact, or have something nastier in mind." How long did it take him to learn that? He laughs a deep, trickly laugh. "Thirty-nine years? A looooooonnnng time."

Will he still be stage-diving? The first time he did it he saw two likely ladies in the crowd and decided they'd be a soft landing. "They weren't even buxom, just big, but I liked 'em, they looked good. I thought they'd catch me but it didn't work out. It took a long fucken time before anybody did catch me."

Now, he says, he's more confident and doesn't have to be so showy - and the setting's different. "I used to play stages this high," his hand hovers not far off the ground, "no barrier, I'd be as close as I am to you. Now you've got fucken horseback police. It's a terrible huge distance to the next human being. And there are horrible cameras and cranes. It's about insurance, too. And," he adds, recalling his old stage trick, "I can't bend over backwards and pick up a dime in my teeth. I never practised, I could just do it. I think it was something wrong with me, something rubbery."

He looks up at the darkening sky and mosquitoes. "Come inside with me," he says, and as we slope across the lawn he muses on the role of the great Rock Iguana at 60. "I think there's some things you did when you're a certain age that are a fair cop to do again when you're older, and get away with it. And others you shouldn't even try, and nobody wants to see you try. I think people in general in the modern age are totally flummoxed by the idea of being over 40. Terrified, shittified. What I get is the message that people are just happy to see somebody over 40 doing anything that isn't too embarrassing."·